Purdy Grievances

Scenes from the class struggle in the faculty lounge.

Readers of a certain age will remember Jedediah Purdy. In 1999, when he was just 24, he enjoyed a brief prominence as a literary enfant angélique after he published a book titled "For Common Things," which championed sincerity and declaimed against irony.

"Purdy was home-schooled until age 13," Marshall Sella reported in a contemporaneous profile for the New York Times magazine. "His sudden exposure to pop culture has kindled in him a blocky notion that America is in Trouble. The country, he...